Ex-con Margaret, plastic surgery nurse, serial liar and bereaved mother of cute tragic cancer victim Pixie, has been discovered stealing from Drew.
Her son Curtis, practised criminal, charmer, threatener, opportunist, hyper reactive emotional time-bomb and in league with his mother, might easily have committed the awful deed while all eyes were distracted by the cliff-hanger wedding/mass slaying in the hospital caff.
Virginia, Drew's desperate, stalking, permanently mascara tear stained ex-wife, rejected for the umpteenth time in no uncertain terms, clearly has motive for a crime of passion.
Even Victoria, tough competent ambitious young doctor but fragile woman who confessed her sexual abuse history unguardedly to Drew in bed, took severe umbrage when he seemed to betray her trust and has shown herself eerily steely under fire in the past.
Long shot Boyd was in the building, he knows Harper his ex-bride-to-be (in epic blood-stained wedding dress) has chemistry with Drew. I doubt Boyd did it though because a better four-way happily ever after is clearly aligning in the stars - sigh.
Do I hear murmurings of disapproval from high-minded readers at this plunge into the trivial entanglements of soap opera?
Think again.
Locally produced television soap opera was the genre which finally destroyed the parasitical European colonial mindset once known as the Kiwi cultural cringe. Where allegedly higher literary forms attempted landfall, popular local soap saw the mass acceptance of our selves and our unique place as suitable subjects for fiction. Hallelujah!
Subsequently Shortland Street has performed an essential service by training and employing a massive number of New Zealand acting and TV production personnel.
The show has presciently elucidated hot button issues, arguably influenced fashion, music and interior design, normalised vernacular Te Reo and tikanga Maori, and provided the kind of ongoing vicarious fictional community which offers viewers catharsis via a reliable parallel universe where no real humans are harmed in the making.
Whangarei local Jarrod Martin won't be back in the terrifying role of substance- crazed, failed suction catheter salesman and father and rampaging gunman Gareth Hutchins who was killed by the armed offenders squad, unless Shortland Street's writers decide to depart uncharacteristically into the realms of magic realism.
Which might not be a bad plot direction considering that because our little Pacific paradise has been relatively free thus far of the mass-shooting epidemic occupying foreign headlines, the 2015 cliff-hanger massacre in Shortland Street's caff lurched dangerously towards gratuitous global colonisation of our imaginative space once again.
Let's hope life does not imitate art in this respect.
